by Tracey Drew
My jaw creaked shut in relief. “Lucas was his boss; they weren’t friends. Neither were you and he, or so I believe.”
I couldn’t see the dentist’s face, but the absolute stillness in the room told me he’d heard every word. He hissed out a breath. “A lot of people in this town didn’t like him.”
“I don’t think dislike was the reason Lucas turned up dead with a knife sticking out of his back.”
“Maybe the drugs?” Brian made a sucking sound like he was mashing his tongue against his teeth. “Seems to me someone did Cape Discovery a favor by taking that dirtbag out of the picture.”
He turned away, and rattling sounds came from his instrument tray. When he leaned back over me, he held in his meaty fist what I assumed was the dreaded drill.
“We’ll give your pearly whites a quick polish, hmm?” he said.
I’m not ashamed to say tears of relief sprang from my eyes under the dark sunglasses. Polishing I could cope with. I nodded—not that he appeared to be waiting for permission, as the polisher whizzed to life—and obediently opened wide.
But before the minty paste could touch my teeth, I blurted out, “I think someone killed Lucas for more personal reasons.”
The polisher abruptly stopped, and Brian’s caterpillar eyebrows arrowed down. “Like what?”
“A woman,” I said. “Maybe a jealous boyfriend…or husband.” I was thankful for the sunglasses as the dentist’s gaze grew flinty.
“What are you implying?”
“Just that you might have had an issue with the way Lucas behaved toward your wife.”
“And because I look like some thug who manhandles drunks out of a nightclub instead of a dentist, you assume I bashed his head in?”
I blinked up at him. Now that he mentioned it, he did look more like a bouncer than a dentist. It wouldn’t have taken much effort on his part to overpower Lucas, a much smaller man.
The buzzing started again. “Open, please.”
I obeyed, and minty freshness assaulted my nose. As the polisher traversed my teeth, I watched the dentist watching me.
“On the night of the murder,” he said briskly, “I was home with my wife and stepson. After dinner, we all went for a walk along the beach. Back home, we watched a movie together, then Dylan and I played a few games on his PlayStation before we all went to bed.”
“An or ife?”
“And my wife?” His giant shoulders lifted in a shrug. “I overreacted to a bit of harmless flirting. We talked it out—or rather, she talked; I agreed I’d overreacted and anything and everything was my fault…” He gave me a henpecked smile to show that although he looked as if he could extract teeth from a great white without fear, he was scared of his five-foot-two wife and was, therefore, harmless. “And that was the end of that.”
As the buzzing polisher was now so far back in my mouth that I feared swallowing it, I gave him a thumbs up to show I believed him. Though I wasn’t sure I really did.
The dentist raised the chair to the upright position and instructed me to rinse and spit.
I swirled the pale blue rinse around my gritty, minty mouth.
“If you’re looking for someone who had it in for Lucas, you should talk to Dylan’s school principal.”
The liquid splattered out of me, staining blue droplets around the basin. I swiveled abruptly, my feet tumbling off the chair to hit the floor. “You mean Isabel Burton?”
“Dylan saw her waiting out the back of the store a few times.”
“That’s hardly evidence she had it in for Lucas. She could’ve been waiting for Sean.” A perfectly reasonable assumption, except I somehow doubted Isabel and my brother had anything in common.
No. If Isabel had hung around outside the store, she must have been waiting for the owner, not Sean.
I replayed last Thursday night’s knitting group discussion when Lucas’s name had cropped up. What had Isabel said? She’d asked Skye whether Lucas had done or said anything inappropriate. And she’d blushed.
“Not according to Dylan.” Brian’s voice dropped to a conspirator’s level. “Last year, before school finished for the term, Dylan was meeting with Ms. Burton about a fundraising campaign he and some other students were organizing. She was called out of the meeting for a moment and left her phone on the desk. He said he couldn’t help but see Lucas’s name flash up on the screen with a brief, but, ah, personal message.”
I didn’t want to ask, but curiosity compelled me. “What did it say?”
Brian shook his head. “Dylan was too embarrassed to repeat it. We stumbled onto the perils of sexting by accident, and I think he was already regretting telling me that much. He just said it was majorly NSFW.”
Not suitable for work. Huh.
So, Isabel and Lucas. Huh, again.
“You might want to…” Brian touched his chin. “With the bib.”
Oh, yeah. Splash back and drool. I dabbed my lips and chin with the paper bib. It came away stained with pale blue splotches. Sophistication personified, that was me. I dumped the sunglasses on the armrest and slid off the chair.
“Your teeth are in tip-top condition,” he said, as if this were a normal checkup. “I’ll have Jennifer set up an appointment reminder for next year.”
“Thanks.” I snatched up my purse from beside the torture chair and fled.
Jennifer was on the phone when I approached her desk to pay. She covered the mouthpiece. “I’ll send Brian’s bill out to you. He knows where you live.” With a dismissive wave, she returned to her call.
I slunk out of the surgery, wondering if her words were actually a thinly veiled threat.
Nine
Business tended to be brisk on Monday mornings, with customers who’d knitted or crocheted up a storm during the weekend replenishing their yarn stashes. This Monday morning was even busier than usual, with every town gossip wanting my advice on one kind of yarn or another…as an excuse to vicariously experience my gruesome discovery.
Harry and I shifted more stock in eight hours than we had over the entire past month. Seemed murder made for good business. And the sign-up sheet for an after-hours class for beginners—which had stubbornly remained blank after I pinned it to the store’s noticeboard two weeks ago—was now filled with names. Apparently, a quick overview of Friday morning’s events had only whetted the scandalmongers’ appetites.
A number of our Serial Knitter and Happy Hooker regulars called into the store and volunteered to help with tomorrow night’s first lesson. Generous, but altruism wasn’t the main reason for this sudden interest in teaching others yarn crafts at Nana Dee-Dee’s store.
I still thought of Unraveled as my nana’s. It wasn’t that I hadn’t had fun working there with Harry these past few months. I’d enjoyed the slower small-town pace and easy companionship of my granddad immensely. And it wasn’t that Harry was territorial over how I managed Unraveled. He was all for my ideas of implementing an online shopping option and a social media presence. I just didn’t know whether I, a mundane eight-ply, could be knitted into the brightly colored, sparkly community around me without forming holes and dropped stitches in the smooth stockinette that was Cape Discovery.
How was that for a creative metaphor?
Nana Dee-Dee would have told me to get over myself.
I sank into one of the two armchairs and picked up another of my new initiatives from the basket beside it: a sample square to be added to the growing pile of customer-created ones then sewn into charity rugs. After stroking my fingertips over the piece’s soft bumps, I began knitting another row of seed stitch someone else had started. As the repetitive knit one, purl one worked its magic, the tension tightening my spine seeped out into the needles and got lost in the motion.
The bell above Unraveled’s door tinkled, and I glanced up as Isabel stepped inside. Just the person I wanted to see. And since she hadn’t yet spotted me, I took the opportunity to really see her. Not as the high school principal or as a semi-regular customer, but as a wo
man.
And a potential killer.
Although uncomfortable analyzing her attractiveness to the opposite sex, even in the privacy of my mind, if what Brian Werth said was true…
Physically, Isabel was a little taller than me and heavier through the waist and hips, which she tried to disguise with tops that skimmed over those areas and instead highlighted her other assets. Two in particular that some men would consider irresistible. As she was growing her shoulder-length brown hair out of an unfortunate haircut—her words, not mine—she kept it off her roundish face with a bandana tied rakishly in a make-do hairband. In my opinion, her unremarkable face became pretty when she smiled, which she didn’t often do. If I had to describe what I knew of her personality in one word, it would be…earnest.
Sparrow-like, her gaze darted around the shop and finally landed on me. “There you are. I thought you must’ve abandoned your post from sheer exhaustion.”
“It’s been a busy morning. I needed a break.” I set the needles back in the basket—a dozen new rows added to the square—and smiled. “Can I help you with something?”
“I thought it was about time I overcame my fear of double-pointed needles and tackled a pair of socks. What can you tempt me with?”
We spent the next fifteen minutes in pleasant discussion about patterns, yarn, and the terrifying-at-first double-pointed needles. Proud of my budding salesperson skills, I easily talked her into two different sock patterns, top-of-the-line needles, plus two lovely hand-dyed hanks of wool-blend yarn from a local supplier. While she debated with herself over color choice—and there were many—Kit sashayed into the store and twined around my ankles.
I scooped him up and cuddled him on his back, giving him a belly scratch at the same time. Pearl would’ve torn my hand to shreds at the indignity of the position, but Kit purred at an ear-splitting decibel.
“Oh, look at him,” Isabel cooed. She shoved the turquoise yarn back on the shelf and dug around in her purse until she found her small container of cat treats. “Here you are, you beautiful boy.” She offered him a treat, and he gently cupped her fingers with his front paws as he accepted it.
Kit had no issues with exploiting the cuteness factor for his own gains. Sure enough, she offered him a second treat. After he’d crunched that down, I set him on his feet.
“That’s enough for you, chunky monkey,” I said as he swished his tail in annoyance at his plans being thwarted. “Your fangs will fall out.”
A not-so-subtle lead into the subject of Dylan Werth.
“Oh, no,” Isabel said with utter seriousness. “There’s no sugar in these.”
“I just had a dental checkup this morning. Guess I’m a little paranoid.”
Isabel returned the treats to her bag, but before she could resume poring over yarn colors, I said, “Their son goes to your school, doesn’t he? I hear he’s doing very well academically.”
Her hand froze halfway to the shelf. “Who told you that? Dylan?”
“His mother.”
“Ah. Parents.” She didn’t roll her eyes, but the eye-roll was in the tone of her voice. “Dylan’s exam results won’t be out for a couple of days, but if his derived grade exam results are anything to go by… He might want to reconsider university is all I’ll say.” Her lips sucked in for a moment. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was most unprofessional of me.”
“Do you know Dylan well?”
“No more than I know any of our seniors. He’s a good student—well, up until the halfway through last year, anyway. He was a shoo-in for ahead prefect role this year, but after our last meeting…”
“Something happened at your last meeting?” I prompted.
She exhaled loudly through her nose; her jaw clenched tight. “He didn’t seem himself. He was…off, somehow.”
Was that before or after he’d seen the inappropriate message on her phone? I risked losing a loyal customer by confronting Isabel, but weighted against my brother’s future, there seemed no other option.
“Because he found out about your relationship with Lucas Kerr?”
Her eyes bugged open. “Pardon?”
“You and Lucas. He saw a message on your phone while you were out of the room.”
Isabel’s face had paled, except for two red splotches on her cheekbones. “He must’ve misunderstood. Lucas and I were not in a relationship.”
“You weren’t romantically involved?”
“Romantic?” She got a pinched look on her face. “No, I wouldn’t say romantic. We flirted back and forth on a couple of occasions when I was in his store. Lucas was a handsome man, and I was flattered by the attention.”
I nodded in what I hoped was an encouraging but non-judgmental way.
“But whatever that young man thought he saw on my phone, I’d take with a grain of salt.”
“It didn’t go further than that?” I pressed. “You never went to the store after hours or to his RV?”
Isabel visibly stiffened, her shoulders thrusting back. “Absolutely not. And I don’t like what you’re suggesting. How could you believe I had something to do with that man’s tragic demise?” With a wince, she clapped a hand to her lower back, muttering about her sciatica.
Lucas had been relegated to ‘that man’ within the space of a few seconds. A deliberate ploy to psychologically distance herself from someone she’d been attracted to? Call me suspicious, but was flirting really all there’d been between them?
“Come sit down.” I guided her to the armchair I’d vacated.
Isabel gingerly lowered herself into the seat, hugging her purse close to her stomach. “Honestly, if you’re trying to do the police’s job for them, I’d recommend you ask Edward Hanbury about the real reason he hated Lucas.”
I plopped into the second armchair and crossed my legs. “I thought it was professional rivalry. Lucas undercutting Ed’s prices.”
Isabel let out a lip-curling pffft. “That’s what he’d trumpet about to anyone who’d listen. It’s a reason, but it’s not the real reason.”
She lowered her voice—although we were now alone in the store. Apart from Kit, who’d found a stray sunbeam and was licking his furry hindquarters. “Last year, I was caught out by a sciatica attack outside the pop-up store, so I stopped to rest against the wall until it passed. Lucas and Ed were out the back of the store, at the end of the driveway. They didn’t appear to notice me, probably because they were deep in a heated discussion. Ed looked as if he wanted to take a swing at Lucas but didn’t quite dare. Lucas said, ‘If you don’t want your wife finding out about your checkout chick on the side, you’ll do as I ask.’”
“Ed’s having an affair?”
“Sure sounded that way.”
“Donna will be devastated.” My heartstrings knotted with sympathy. “They’ve just celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.”
“Men are dogs,” Isabel said. “The lot of ’em.”
While I didn’t agree with her generalization, there were certainly a few who fit that description. Jared immediately sprang to mind. But I wasn’t going to waste a second dwelling on his spineless lack of character, not as I recalled the last part of Isabel’s story.
“Lucas was blackmailing Ed. What did he want him to do?”
“A lawnmower started up somewhere behind the shop, and I missed what they said next.” Her hand slipped between her hip and the armchair, and she winced. “Despite the pain, I didn’t want to be caught eavesdropping, so I hobbled away as fast as I could.”
By this time, Isabel had released her death grip on her purse, perhaps assuming she’d successfully diverted my busybody attention elsewhere. “You know, I think I’ll go for the carnation pink, soft violet, and primrose yellow. They’re all such pretty colors; I just can’t choose one. Could you ring those up for me?”
“Certainly.”
I made my way over to the fingering weight yarn and selected the right shades. The soft and squishy yarn would knit up into a snuggly pair of socks. As I
bagged Isabel’s purchases, she slowly made her way to the service counter.
“My guess is Ed’s sleeping with Bianca or Monique,” she said. “It’s a small world. I taught Monique math about five years ago.” Her nose crinkled. “The girl can’t function without a cash register doing all the work for her.”
With a perfunctory smile, I handed over the bag. “Math was never my strong suit either.”
“Can’t imagine what she and Ed have in common, given that he’s all about the numbers.” She tucked the bag under her arm. “I’ll see you on Thursday night. Hopefully, someone will be able to show me how to cast on with these metal toothpicks.”
Isabel walked to the door, her gait easier and apparently pain free. She opened the door and hesitated before turning back to me with a grim chuckle. “Ed’s such a tightwad. It really must’ve burned his britches having to fork over his hard-earned cash. Have to say, it serves him right.”
Then with a wink, she left, Pearl slipping inside as the door swung closed behind her. Tail waving at the sky, she trotted over to greet her brother with a nose kiss before the two of them sprawled out, sharing the afternoon sunbeam.
I replayed our conversation. Could Ed’s affair have anything to do with Lucas’s murder? How much had Ed paid to keep his blackmailer silent? Was money even what the blackmailer was after? And more importantly, if it wasn’t, what might Ed have done to shut his blackmailer up?
Permanently.
As Harry was a former cop, my inability to remain patient on a stakeout must have come from a different part of the gene pool.
After Isabel’s earlier revelations, I found myself skulking around outside the Hanburys’ house at nine thirty that night. Helpfully, to counterbalance my below-par stakeout skills, the Hanburys owned a McMansion on the waterfront. I was able to comfortably hide in plain sight on a conveniently placed public bench facing the ocean. Just another holidaymaker taking in the view of a full moon glimmering on the softly pleated waves as they hissed ashore.
